SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

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One weekend in 1992, Björk turned up at the door of a terraced house in Moss Side, Manchester. There to greet her was Graham Massey of electronic music pioneers 808 State. The pair had met before, when the Icelandic singer helped write two songs for 808 State’s third album ex:el. This time – having recently left her own group The Sugarcubes to embark on a solo career – Björk was hoping Massey could return the favour.

Over the course of that day, in a makeshift studio set up in the front room, the two musicians came up with a couple of songs. One was a ballad; the other, a propulsive banger based around a drum loop borrowed from Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee

Breaks. During the chorus, Björk scraped a 10p coin down the neck of her bass guitar. The track came to be known as Army of Me.

“It was really spontaneous,” Massey tells me now. “We knew there was an energy to Army of Me. But it seemed too easy, too simple. It was just a breakbeat and a sequence and a kind of scat vocal.”

When neither of that day’s songs were included on Björk’s first solo album, Debut, the following year, Massey feared they would never see the light of day, but they reappeared on its follow-up, 1995’s Post. What’s more, Army of Me, re-recorded without the Zeppelin sample from the demo but retaining its menacing bite, became the album’s lead single and Björk’s first UK top 10 hit.

Now, 25 years on from its release, Post is seen as one of the finest albums of the Nineties – weird, wonderful and widescreen. Musically, it spans techno, trip hop, jazz and the kind of glitchy ambient soundscapes that would later become Radiohead’s signature. Commercially, it marked Björk’s zenith, peaking at number two in the UK album charts and going on to spawn two further top 10 singles (It’s Oh So Quiet and Hyperballad). Howard Bernstein, the musician known as Howie B who co-produced and engineered the album, believes that Post showed other musicians just how bold they could be: “It created space for music to jump off a diving board,” as he put it. It also turned Björk into a superstar.

But critical and commercial success brought with them devastating consequences. By the time Björk started work on her next album, Homogenic, her life had spiralled out of control. Her music would never sound the same again.

In 1993, Björk Gumundsdóttir moved to London, where, she has said, she lived “the most happy life”. Not yet 30, she immersed herself in club culture. “She was living large, definitely,” says Massey. “We were clubbing left, right and centre,” Bernstein recalls. “It wasn’t just London. It was New York, Paris, everywhere. It was a pretty dynamic time.”

Björk was far more interested in electronic music than Britpop; she preferred Aphex Twin and Tricky (with whom she worked on Post and later dated) to Pulp, Blur or Oasis. Wherever she went, she picked up musical influences, like a shopper on a spree, leading Bono to dub her “the Imelda Marcos of good ideas”.

Björk’s zest for experimentation extended to the recording of Post.

It has been rumoured that she sang the echoey album track Cover Me while naked in a cave full of bats. Bernstein, who was with her in the Bahamas at the time, dispels this myth, although it is true, he says, that Björk had wanted to record the track in a cave for its “beautiful reverb”, even though he reassured her he could use mixing desk trickery to create the same effect in a studio. When she insisted, Bernstein had a special outdoor microphone flown in from Miami and the team trekked to a nearby cave.

“There was a really small hole to get in and it was full of bats,” says Massey. “It took me about three minutes to go forward and I came back on my knees in about two seconds… And then Björk went in and she came out just as quickly.” But the singer did record another track while standing in the sea with a long microphone lead stretching to a diesel generator on the beach. “It was quite an exciting thing because there was a strong risk of her getting an electric shock,” recalls Bernstein.

Post was released on June 13 1995 amid a blizzard of problems. The original arty cover photo shoot was scrapped at a cost of £24,000 for something more poppy and colourful, and MTV temporarily banned the video for Army of Me which appeared to show Björk bombing an art museum. Then, a sample on the track Possibly Maybe became the subject of a lawsuit launched against the singer. Björk and Derek Birkett, the boss of her record label, One Little Indian, responded by threatening to recall and destroy all 750,000 copies of Post before the situation was resolved without a day in court. But these obstacles were nothing compared with what happened next. In July that year, the singer embarked on a gruelling 105-date world tour. Still on the road the following February, she arrived at Bangkok airport accompanied by her nine year-old son, Sindri. The pair were walking through the arrivals terminal when a radio reporter, Julie Kaufman, approached

A livid Björk pounced on the reporter at the airport and wrestled her to the ground